Fried Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present a body of work by Johan Thom created at the Nirox Foundation in 2014 and exhibited at its Project space in the Maboneng precinct, Johannesburg. The series of prints, titled: ‘Prints from the Animal Series’ is a series of etchings produced by Thom in collaboration with a number of well-known artists.

Johan Thom will be in conversation with inimitable photographer Roger Ballen tonight @ 18h30 as part of his book launch for the new and expanded edition of Outland (2001).

The selection of photographs on exhibition in the Collector’s Room was primarily curated around aesthetic concerns. These would include formal aspects of the work such as the use of line, light and dark tones, composition and so forth.

From a curatorial perspective we feel that the socio-cultural and political dimensions of the work have been explored in great depth. We implicitly accept and understand that Ballen’s work has a deeply political grounding and touches a raw nerve in the politics of representation in post-apartheid South Africa – especially where it concerns issues of whiteness racially speaking (of what it represents or should represent) and of ethics (of power relationship between the photographer and his subjects), for example.

The questions that Thom will touch on during this interview concern the particularity of Ballen’s artistic vision – the photographs as artworks the photographer as an artist. He says about the interview: “I hope to expose if only partially something of Ballen’s artistic working methods and processes, i.e. making; conceptualizing; selecting and generally creating the imaginative world that has become the hallmark of his artistic output since the time of first publishing Outland in 2001”.

Call for Participation
We would like to invite artworks, papers, posters, presentations, performances, activities for the Forum to be hosted by
Department of Visual Arts (UP)
24 July 2015
at
the Van Wouw house under the rubric of
*imagetext*

Taking our cue from WJT Mitchell’s concept imagetext we want to explore the complex, intermedial, multimodal exchange between image/text and text/image. The following topics may be creatively addressed but are not exclusive:

How are images translated into text? How is text imaged/imagined?
What is the interface between image and text/text and image?
How do image and text/ text and image relate?
How are the boundaries established, structured and maintained between image and text?

Refreshments including tea and biscuits will be provided throughout the day. For lunch bookings a number of eateries including Piza e Vino (http://www.pizaevino.co.za/brooklyn.html ) is in walking distance from the venue.